Abstract

Historical geography is a distinct subdiscipline within human geography whose prime concern lies with the reconstruction of past geographies and tracing their transformation in the regional context. The geographies of the past that the Schools of Cambridge, Berkeley, Kyoto, Yugong, and Lee tried to reconstruct were customarily called historical landscape as well. Initially landscape denoted a concrete realm of the region and it was only after the onset of modern capitalism in the 16th century that landscape came to indicate a genre of art or rural scenery to be consumed emotionally and visually. Geomorphology turns out to be the first which made landscape, formerly agrarian land or landscape painting, an object of disciplinary inquiry. Also responsible for the institutionalization of landscape studies were English historians, historical geographers, and Carl Sauer of Berkeley. On condition that landscape consistently transforms itself with time, European scholars set out to reconstruct cross-sections of the past and those on the other side of the Atlantic focused on changing cultural landscape in line with Sauerean culture history. The year 1980 marked the turning point which saw the transition from empiricist traditional cultural geography into theory oriented new cultural geography. The subsequent cultural turn of historical geography leads up to more nuanced, critical, and interpretative historical geography embracing the metaphors of ways of seeing, text, icon, etc. Another point of reference is that historical landscape is put to the test of time; it is shaped, transformed, and—with the exception of a few—vanished near the end of its life cycle. The fact that historical landscape both as clues about the past and as heritage is on the verge of extinguishing asks for protection and preservation. As if to respond to the urgent call, natural and cultural landscapes start to be discussed within the realms of environmental ethics and, as they represent collective memory and group identity, heritage preservation. Amid growing concern for the utilization of landscape heritage, some historical landscapes of prime importance have been designated world heritage—natural or cultural—to be visited by and preserved for world tourists and be transmitted to the next generation.